THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

*Wright, Orville (1871-1948), Wright, Wilbur (1867-1912).

In 1903, two brothers named Wilbur and Orville Wright sent a letter to government officials in Washington, D.C., announcing a revolutionary invention. They wrote, “The series of experiments upon which we have been engaged for the past five years, has ended in the production of a flying ma­chine”. At the time, however, such an achievement was considered impossible, and their letter and invention were ignored.

Nevertheless, the Wright brothers had in­deed accomplished the impossible, and they had not done it by accident. It was success­fully done through years of study, experi­ment, and hard work.

The Wright brothers were raised in Ohio, the sons of the bishop. Wilbur had been born in 1867; and he and his brother Orville, younger by four years, enjoyed a similarity in spirit and interests which made them a natural team.

Ever since childhood the brothers had dis­played a talent for building things. Their fa­ther had encouraged them, urging them to earn money to meet the cost of any project they started. Both brothers were especially interested in mechanical things. This inter­est, together with their pioneering spirit and gift for original thinking, eventually produced the “impossible” machine — the airplane.

As two poorly educated young men, the Wright brothers were the first to discover the secret of air travel that had escaped the genius of the world’s greatest scholars for thousands of years. Their earliest contact with the dream of flight came as children when their father brought them a toy heli­copter. It was basically a flying top pow­ered by twisted rubberbands, a crude fore­runner of the familiar flying machine that is so useful today. The boys studied a toy, took it apart, and finally discarded it. But the memory of its flying principles stayed with them and sparkled their imagination. They began to explore other airborne ob­jects. They watched birds and studied the lifting and drifting of the birds’ wings soar­ing against the sky. They experimented with kites and set up their own kite-making busi­ness for neighbourhood children.

As the brothers grew older, they continued their studies, reading the history of man’s early attempts to fly and reports of recent experiments with gliders. Such studies helped to overcome their lack of formal tech­nical education; but from the start of their experiments, they found that they needed money to pay for their research.

To earn this money, the brothers in 1892 opened a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. It was a successful enterprise and they were soon marketing a bicycle of their own de­sign. But their main interest remained in the study of flight.

The Wright decided to start their experi­ments with motorless gliders. They built a crude craft and journeyed to the eastern shore of the United States. They wanted an unpopulated area with soft sand and, more important, steady winds. They wrote to United States Weather Bureau for ad­vice and were directed to the sand dune re­gion near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. There, late in 1900, the brothers completed their first glider flight with a man aboard. Wilbur was the pilot, proving only that man could glide through the air. The more im­portant question remained unanswered: could man fly through the air?

For three more years the Wrights worked to improve their glider, paying particular attention to its control and to the shape of the wings. By experimenting with movable portions of the wings, they made important improvements in flight control. Orville then designed an engine, which they built and mounted on the glider to produce flying power. They also experimented with vari­ous designs for all-important propellers.

The strange new craft gradually took shape, first in the Wright brothers’ minds and then physically, as they worked in the yard of their little bicycle shop. At the same time, howev­er, the scientific world was coming to the conclusion that flight in heavier-than-air machines seemed impossible. There had al­ready been many costly failures of powered flight experiments, and scientists were say­ing that such flights just could not be done.

The brothers’ experiments had taught them the basic principles of flight that trained scientific minds had failed to find. So once again the brothers returned to the sand hills at Kitty Hawk this time in the middle of winter. The date was December 17, 1903.

Their flying machine, made of pieces of wood and cloth, looked too fragile to fly. With Orville at the controls, the pioneer plane moved down a track, was catapulted into the air, and flew for 12 seconds. It was the first controlled, sustained flight of an airplane.

Though they had conquered the air, the Wrights still had to conquer the public’s disbelief — the refusal of people to agree that a successful flight had been made. So the brothers returned to Ohio and contin­ued with their experiments, improving their airplane and testing it near their home in Dayton. They sent letter after letter to gov­ernment officials, but the news of their in­tention was either ignored or caused only little interest.

By the end of 1904, they could keep the air­plane up for five minutes, and fly complete circles. On October 5, 1905, in Dayton, Ohio, they flew 24 miles in 38 minutes — as far and as long as the gasoline supply would al­low. The Wright brothers were granted a patent for their invention in 1906. They formed the Wright Company to manufacture aircraft and they began at that time to seek a market.

By 1908, the Wrights had gained world­wide fame. When Wilbur was in France dazzling European audiences with flying demonstrations, Orville was conducting a series of flights before United States gov­ernment officials at Fort Myer, Virginia. As a result of these demonstrations, the United States purchased its first military aircraft, a Wright machine, for a cost of $25,000, and licenses were granted to firms abroad for the manufacture of the Wright brothers’ aircraft.

The brothers never lost their modesty when honours were showered upon them. They paid little attention to the medals and rib­bons which they received from scientific societies, and again and again, they refused to make public speeches.

Their unwillingness to speak out in public was emphasized by Wilbur when he comment­ed, “I know of only one bird, the parrot, that talks, and the parrot cannot fly very high”.

For Wilbur there were to be only few short years of success. In May 1912, he died of typhoid fever. His death marked the end of one of the greatest inventive partnerships in history.

Though Orville continued to work in associ­ation for several years more, his heart was no longer in it. He flew a plane for the last time in 1918. He retired from his company and lived quietly at his home in Dayton.

Also contributing to Orville’s withdrawal from public life was his unhappiness with legal disputes with fellow aviation pioneer Glenn Hammond Curtiss* arising over the planet rights which the Wright Company held on aircraft design.

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*Curtiss, Glenn Hammond (1878-1930) - American inventor and aviator.

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He also felt the U. S. Government sighted his and Wilbur’s achievements when, in 1914, the Smithso­nian Institution* placed on display Samuel Langley’s** Aerodrome, which had been built but not flown in 1903, with the notice that it was the first heavier-than-air machine capable of flight.

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*Smithsonian Institution — the largest museum complex in the world founded in 1846. Most of the units of the institu­tion are located in Washington, D.C.

When later invented by the Smithsonian to place the Kitty Hawk Flyer on display Orville declined, and in­stead sent it to London’s Science Museum.

In 1943, at the request of Franklin D. Roo­sevelt*, Orville asked that the plane he re­turned to be put on permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian.

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*Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882-1945) — 32nd president of the USA.

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Orville, however, nev­er saw the display. On January 30, 1948, he died. The following December 17, exact­ly 45 years after the first flight, the Flyer was placed on permanent exhibition. A sign on the plane reads: